Not Applicable.
The present invention relates to establishing a communication session between users that are engaged in active sessions in an Internet chat or instant messaging environment, and more specifically, to initiating a video telephony call sending video over a public data network simultaneously with sending voice within a telephone call placed over a public telephone network.
Internetworking (i.e., the interconnection of many computer networks) allows the interaction of very large numbers of computers and computer users. The most well known example is the Internet. Computers connected to the Internet may be widely separated geographically and utilize many different hardware and software configurations. In order to achieve communication sessions between any two endpoints on the Internet, an addressing system and various standard protocols for exchanging computer data packets have been developed.
Each packet sent over the Internet includes fields that specify the source and destination address of the packet according to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses assigned to the network interface nodes involved. Currently assigned addresses comprise 32 bits, although future standards allow for 128 bit addresses. The 32 bit addresses are normally written by breaking the 32 bits into 4 groups of 8 bits each and writing the decimal equivalents of each group separated by periods (e.g., 208.25.106.10).
Since numerical IP addresses are inconvenient to use and remember, a protocol for assigning and accessing logical names is used known as the domain name system (DNS). DNS servers are deployed within the Internet which perform a translation function between a logical domain name such as xe2x80x9csprint.comxe2x80x9d and its numerical equivalent xe2x80x9c208.25.106.10xe2x80x9d. After receiving an IP address back from a DNS server, a computer can forward data packets to the IP address and establish a connection or session with the remote computer.
While the DNS system works well for hosted content (e.g., material made available for browsing by commercial and private entities), it is not well suited to ad hoc communications or exchanges of data between individuals. Hosting a website and registering an IP address within the DNS system is expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, due to an impending shortage of IP addresses and the cost for maintaining use of each IP address, many Internet service providers assign IP addresses dynamically to their individual users. In other words, when a user signs on to their service, they are temporarily assigned an IP address from an address pool assigned to their service provider. The user occupies that IP address only for their current session.
Even when individual users have their own static IP addresses, and when other users can remember the IP address of a user with whom they would like to establish a connection session over the Internet (e.g., for voice or video telephony), the need to configure their hardware or software is too complex for many users. This is one reason why e-mail is such a popular and successful Internet application. A mail server with an easy to remember domain name acts as intermediary between two individual users. Using a simple application program and the recipient""s account name on the mail server (i.e., their e-mail address), text messages and computer files can be exchanged. The exchange, however, does not allow the users to interact in real time.
Two Internet applications that have been implemented to provide real-time interaction between users are chat and instant messaging. In chat applications, a group of users access a chat server which relays communications from each individual user to each of the users in the group (i.e., a chat room). Thus, when one user types text within the chat application on their computer, the text is transmitted to the chat server which then relays or forwards that text to all the users active in the particular chat session for displaying within the chat application on the active users"" computers. Chat servers which utilize video data have also been realized. In a typical chat environment, chat rooms may be available to any users requesting access to them based on predefined subject areas of the chat rooms. Thus, a user can interact in the chat room with other users that they do not know in advance.
Instant messaging (IM) is similar to chat applications except that each user sets up a personalized contact list in advance of other users with whom they may wish to exchange instant messages. When an IM user goes online, their IM application sends a message to the IM server. The IM server identifies which other users in the user""s contact list are also on line and then sends status messages to the user and the contacts, enabling any of them to initiate a private exchange of messages.
The present invention is related to video telephony as taught in copending U.S. application Ser. No. 09/978,616 and Ser. No. 10/033,813. In the described video telephony system, the Internet or other computer network provides a channel for carrying a video portion of a video telephony call while the POTS (plain old telephone system) or PSTN (public switched telephone network) provides a channel for carrying the voice portion of the video telephony call.
An important issue in Internet communications is the bandwidth or speed at which any particular connection operates. In the case of prior art video conferencing using the Internet (such as video chat), insufficiency of the bandwidth utilized for a video call has caused poor voice and picture quality. In the above video telephony system, the voice channel provides more than enough bandwidth to ensure that a good quality voice transmission is obtained. In addition, removing the voice data from the Internet transmission frees up more of the available bandwidth for the video data in that channel. Moreover, since the actual understanding of the video telephony conversations by the participants depends more on the voice signals than on the video signals, the overall satisfaction with video telephony is increased even when video quality may be somewhat lacking.
The present invention relates to enhancing communication between individual users of a computer network, such as the Internet, by providing a transition from a chat or instant messaging environment to a video telephony call.
In one primary aspect of the invention, a method is provided for initiating a video telephony call between at least first and second users, wherein the users have first and second computers and first and second telephones, respectively. The first and second computers are coupled to a computer network and have first and second IP addresses, respectively, and the first and second telephones have first and second telephone numbers, respectively. In the inventive method, first and second computers send log-in messages to a central server coupled to the computer network, wherein the central server stores the first and second IP addresses in association with the first and second telephone numbers, respectively. The central server sends active user identifying information to the first and second computers for a plurality of users currently logged-in to the central server. The first and second computers each display a plurality of available users in response to the active user identifying information, wherein the first computer displays a user selection item corresponding to the second user. The first user activates the user selection item. The first computer sending a video telephony call request identifying the second user to the central server in response to the activation of the selection item. The central server forwards the video telephony call request to the second computer. The second computer displays an acceptance selection item. The second user selects the acceptance selection item. Then the second computer sends an acceptance message to the central server in response to the selection of the acceptance selection item. The first and second computers launch respective video telephony call clients. The call clients exchanging live video data in response to the first and second IP addresses stored in the central server for a video portion of the video telephony call. The central server also establishes a telephone call between the first and second telephones for a voice portion of the video telephony call using a public switched telephone network in response to the first and second telephone numbers stored in the central server.